This week I have been reflecting on how I teach the children in my classes who have special needs and disabilities (SEND). They are exposed to the same input as the other children, mostly listening and speaking in the first instance, with a significant phonics component, then moving on to reading and finally writing. When it comes their speaking and writing output, they have support in the form of knowledge organisers, sentence builders and other paper-based support, as well as extra support from me as they need it, and, if we are lucky, from a teaching assistant.
Until comparatively recently, the way that we catered for a
wide range of abilities in the classroom was to offer multiple differentiated
tasks. This was clearly time consuming
for teachers and often difficult to implement effectively and successfully.
Teachers were often juggling different curricula, and different
tasks with different levels of challenge, and therefore different expectations
and outcomes. Differentiation frequently
limited opportunities for achievement for some groups of children, and was responsible for setting low expectations
of children with learning difficulties.
Adaptive and responsive teaching maintains high
expectations for all children at both the planning and the teaching stages; it
doesn’t make any preconceptions about who the lower ability children are and
who are the higher ability. It’s more
sustainable than differentiation and ultimately not such a burden on the
teacher. It has now gained much more traction and is
embedded in teachers’ Early Career Framework.
Let’s dive more deeply into how adaptive and responsive
teaching might work in the primary languages classroom.
Adaptive and responsive teaching aims to meet the needs of
all children. All children should meet
the high expectations that we set, and all children are able to keep up so that
nobody is left behind and needs to catch up.
It’s vital to recap prior knowledge each lesson, going back
as far as necessary to make connections between prior learning and the new
learning. We can’t assume that those
connections and the memory will be there automatically. We need to ensure that all the children are
in the same place for starting the new content.
Revisiting prior learning will ensure that all children begin the new
learning on the same playing field, ready to build on those foundations. It will also enable you to challenge any
misconceptions that arise.
Language lessons are often far apart. Even lessons a week apart will mean that
children have had a week to forget the previous week’s content. Every language lesson should begin with some
kind of recap or revisiting of prior learning.
Even if you are starting a new topic or unit, an effective spiral
curriculum means that there will be some aspect of the new learning in the new
unit that the children have seen before somewhere. This revisiting often takes the form of
speaking and listening activities, but reading and writing activities can also
be used to repeat and practise prior learning.
Ensure that the order of the units in your scheme of work
allows you to refer back to learning in previous units as well as previous
lessons, and also ensure that their order and your time allocation doesn’t oblige
the learning to move on too quickly without sufficient revisiting and
reinforcement taking place. The language
needs to be truly embedded before you move on.
Some ideas for revisiting prior learning:
- Speaking and listening Ensure that children have the opportunity to
hear the vocabulary several times first, and then practise saying them. A good resource to use is a numberedgrid. Use the numbers for listening
practice – you say one of the words and then children have to tell you which
number it is. Later you say the number
and the children tell you which number it is.
Children can continue these activities in pairs so that all of them are
involved in the recap and not just one at a time.
- Talk
about the language Are there any
links that can be made, either with prior learning or with English, or with any
other language that the children know, to help them to remember the vocabulary? For example, we can remember the colour blanc
/ blanco by thinking of a blank page. Talk about the words you are practising. What part of speech are they? Are they masculine or feminine? How do they know? Don’t shy away from metalanguage. Children will be using a lot of the same
terminology that they hear in their English lessons.
- Reading Short reading activities are a useful way
to recap prior learning. Try activities
such as “Who says…?” or tracking down keywords in the text.
- Mini whiteboards Check everyone’s learning by asking them to write something on their white board and show it to you. Whiteboards can also be used to record and show answers to multiple choice or reading questions. Children like to write on their whiteboard as it is easier to edit, less permanent, and less threatening than a page of their exercise book or workbook.
All these activities will help you to formatively assess the
class’s learning and also the learning and understanding of individuals, so
that you can start to identify where further support will be necessary.
It’s also important that children are aware of the bigger
picture: what are the learning intentions of that lesson, and how does it fit
into the bigger picture of that unit?
How does it build on what they already know? Tell children what you want them to know and
what you want them to be able to do. It’s
likely that this introduction to the lesson will include mention of the three
pillars of vocabulary, grammar and phonics, of course in child-friendly terms.
As children come onto the language production phase of the
learning, whether it be speaking or writing, it’s important that they know what
success sounds like or looks like.
Modelling the activities is therefore very important.
Modelling an activity:
- ‘I do’ Teacher takes the lead while the children observe the ‘expert’. While you are modelling the activity, think out loud, explaining why you are choosing certain words or structures.
- ‘We do’ Teacher and children share preparation of the writing/speaking. Break the model down into small steps and ask questions throughout to check for understanding.
- ‘You do’ Children use the two previous examples to help and support them as they create their own output. The teacher circulates around the room to give immediate verbal feedback and address any misconceptions.
One of the key differences between differentiation and
adaptive and responsive teaching is that teachers should pitch the lesson high
and then provide appropriate support for those who need it in order to enable them
to reach the goals. Children should all
have the same high-quality tasks but with varied scaffolds. Such scaffolds help all children to access
the challenging and ambitious content and make the lesson inherently
inclusive. All children will have the opportunity
to be successful. Ideally any support
that you provide should be temporary and should be gradually withdrawn as the
children become more confident.
Some kinds of support, in no particular order:
- images
- colour coding
- talking time
- word mats
- knowledge organisers
- pre-teaching
- TA support
- translations
- sentence builders
- sentence strips
- working walls
As has already been said, time is often short in language
lessons, and therefore every activity and task that we plan must have a clear
purpose within the framework of the lesson.
Each one needs to allow children to demonstrate what they have learned,
that they can achieve a given step of the lesson so that you can proceed to the
next one. They also need to be planned
to have a clear ‘product’ so that you can see clearly what they can do and what
they have understood. This in turn will
provide evidence for you in case you need to respond and adjust your teaching.
Adaptive and responsive teaching is all about making adjustments
to your teaching methods, materials and language, based on real time assessment
of the children’s understanding and their needs moving forward. It is rooted in and reliant on solid
formative assessment. In language
learning we need to adapt our explanations and questions to suit the needs of
individual learners, their levels and how they learn best. Specialist language teachers, often secondary
trained, will have the experience and the subject knowledge to do this. However the majority of the teachers of
foreign languages in Key Stage 2 (children age 7-11) are non-specialist, and
may well not have the confidence or the knowledge to be able to do this. Your scheme of work, if you are
non-specialist, should include comprehensive information and explanations to
help you to understand the content before you teach it. It would also be ideal if it were to have
alternative explanations or suggestions in the case of having to make adjustments. Adapting from one lesson to the next might be
more straightforward, but how to non-specialist teachers feel about having to
adapt in the moment? There is clearly a
case for additional training and CPD here.
It has already been mentioned that the learning should be
built up in small steps, checking for understanding at the end of each of those
small steps before proceeding to the next one.
Each lesson will comprise a small step within the bigger picture, and
each lesson will also comprise a series of even smaller steps to arrive at that
objective. It’s crucial to check for
understanding at the end of each step and sample the children’s responses at each
stage of the learning. This will show
quickly how well the children have understood and absorbed the learning. Identify the activities in your scheme of
work which will enable you to do this.
It's important that we foster in our classrooms a positive
learning environment which has a culture of safety and support, where children
feel comfortable to take risks and make mistakes. This will reduce their anxiety and motivate
them to have a go.
To summarise: adaptive and responsive teaching requires
children to all be taught the same ambitious curriculum, using the same tasks
with the same level of challenge and high expectations, but children will have
appropriate support to enable them to achieve.
Further reading:
Adaptive Teaching: Moving Beyond Differentiation for MoreEffective Learning, Dr Katy Bloom
Spinning the plates: Responsive and Adaptive teaching inthe mixed MFL classroom, Esmeralda Salgado
Adaptive Teaching: Understanding the Barriers andEnablers, Imogen Barber
What does inclusive teaching look like? Adaptive and responsive teaching strategies,
Matt Bromley
